“Oct. 3, 2001. Tucson. I-10 mile marker 42. Three crows on a power line. Two days later, a Greyhound flipped.”
The “Index of Sinister” began as a grief project. In 2003, Pondo’s daughter, a grad student in Flagstaff, was killed in a crosswalk by a hit-and-run driver. The driver was never found. But a week before her death, Pondo found a note his daughter had scribbled in a journal: “The crossing guard wasn’t there today. Felt wrong.”
He has organized his cards into categories: The Wrong Turn (GPS errors leading to fatal locations), The Gift That Stayed (found objects that precede disappearances), and his largest category, The Quiet Hour — events that occur between 2:00 and 3:00 AM, when, he notes, “the veil between bad luck and malevolence is thinnest.” index of sinister
“Nov. 15. 9:14 AM. A journalist from New York asks about the locked drawer. The pen they borrowed is out of ink. It was full an hour ago.”
Pondo is not a psychic. He is not a detective. He is a patternist — a self-described “indexer of omens.” For two decades, he has scoured local news archives, police scanners, and obituaries, looking for the small, anomalous detail that precedes catastrophe. “Oct
“Don’t worry,” he says. “Probably nothing.”
He closes the olive-green drawer. The label reads: . I-10 mile marker 42
“Sept. 9, 2019. A librarian in Boise checks out a single book: ‘The Secret Sharer.’ Returns it unread. Drowns in her bathtub 12 days later. The book is back on the shelf. No water damage.”